Richard Mosse

How do you turn the devastating reality of the wartorn Democratic Republic of Congo, which has seen 5.4 million deaths since 1988, into a psychedelic dreamscape? Be willing to infiltrate rebel groups and use discontinued military surveillance film, that’s how. Richard Mosse, a 34-year-old Irish artist, is nominated for ‘The Enclave’, a video installation accompanied by disconcertingly sumptuous photographs. The work was commissioned for the 2013 Venice Biennale, where it was ecstatically received. The buzz around Mosse precedes his nomination for the prize. He’s a likely – and worthy – winner.

Alberto García-Alix

Nominated for his 2013 book ‘Autorretrato/Selfportrait’, 58-year old Spanish photographer García-Alix has documented 40 years of hard living, from the post-Franco era in the 1970s, through the heroin addled ’80s, to middle age. Quiffs rise and fall; partners come and go; and staring at us through it all is the artist. It’s narcissistic, sure. But what’s touching about García-Alix’s photos is that, as the stage starts to clear, his posing takes on an air of haunted defiance. If the judges are in reflective mood, the Spaniard could walk away with the prize.

Jochen Lempert

Once you know that Jochen Lempert trained as a biologist before turning to art in the ’90s, you can’t help but look for hard-nosed scientific inquiry in his images of plants and animals. You’ll be looking for a long time, though, because this low-key German seems to have ditched his lab coat in favour of a lens cap. Printed on soft-weave paper to give them a vaporous quality, these images – such as a buzzing fly and a constellation of freckles on a shoulder – concertina space and time. They look as if they could have been made at any point over the past half-century, which is in their favour but probably not to Lempert’s advantage here.

Lorna Simpson

This Brooklyn-born artist’s photograph and text works first gained her critical acclaim in the mid-1980s as they confronted preconceptions of gender, identity and cultural history. Nominated after the success of her first European retrospective in Paris, Simpson continues to question representations of racial identity by boldly appropriating 1950s glamour shots and repositioning herself as the subject. Provocatively political, Simpson could pip Mosse to the post.